Photos from my Colorado adventure
Hello! I just completed another successful two and a half weeks touring the Colorado mountains. Although the snow was not great (Winter Park only has around a 15 inch base, and over half the mountain was closed), I still had a good time! Rather than do a lot of aggressive skiing (the conditions would have made aggressive skiing fairly dangerous), I tried a bunch of new things instead! The most interesting new thing was probably the ski bike, and I am now a licensed snow cyclist! My dad and I both took lots of pictures, and he's posted both the ones from his camera and my camera on his web page.
I did three summits during the trip, two of Mt. Charles which is roughly 12,050 feet, and one of Mt. Prospect which is roughly 11,700 feet. I took a panorama (which I've yet to stitch together) of the view on Mt. Prospect, and my dad took one of Mt. Charles, so eventually when we get those stitched together, I'll post them as well. Anyway, if you're heading out west, here's to hoping you have more snow than we did! Even though the backcountry was bare in spots, we still had a lot of fun goofing around (you might notice some defilement of a USGS marker in the photos ;-).
The UK
Recently (July 9-23), I spent some time in the UK. I've been a bit busy since then, and have not had time to write up my activities and post them. Anyway, I've got some time now, so I'm posting now :-). The primary reason I went to the UK was for the FLoC '10 conference (which was held in Edinburgh, Scotland), where I had a paper in CAV. There is more info (including the paper) on my school home page.
We spent a few days wandering around London, which is quite the tourist trap. I went and saw Abbey Road and walked across the zebra crossing, we went and saw the Eye and Tower of London, we saw the Sherlock Holmes museum, we went to Greenwich to sand on the prime meridian, and Windsor Castle. The world cup final (Spain vs. Holland) occurred, and we watched it in an English pub. Naturally, there were many other visits to pubs too... I had to get the full experience, you know ;-).
After London, we went to Edinburgh for the conference. We didn't do much sight seeing while the conference was in session, but we did eat quite a lot of food, including haggis at the fancy conference dinner where we got to here a bagpiper recite the Address to a Haggis before our meal.
After the conference, we spent a day touring Glasgow, a day touring Edinburgh, and a day touring the Scottish country side (including a boat ride across Loch Ness, but no Nessie sighting). It was a fun trip!
Aditya and I took lots and lots of photos, so enjoy! I stitched some panoramas together, and some of them turned out pretty good. Note that there are no thumbnails because the images are huge, and the thumbnail generation program crashes on them. You'll just have to download them (but do it on a computer with lots of RAM, as the images are ~25 MB each). Enjoy!